Secrets in the Christmas Tree

O Tree! The natural beauty and mystical meaning of the Christmas tree custom is honoured in this simple yuletide slideshow. A poetic meditation on the secrets of the Christmas tree, its meaning, ancient origins and present day symbolism.

Slideshow transcript:

Slide 1: Secrets in the Christmas Tree personal vision :: winter light By Carol Sill

Slide 2: A Tree of Life • In the form of the Christmas tree, the beautiful tree of life comes into our living rooms. • It is an altar, a symbol and an embodiment. • Each year we go through the ancient ritual of the tree – its sacrifice and resurrection in light.

Slide 3: Green, Even in Winter • Even in the coldest dead of winter, when all the other trees have become skeletons, the evergreen is permanent, stable and constant, a symbol of everlasting life.

Slide 4: Why Do We Do This? • Why do we bring this symbol of everlasting life into our homes, into the main room of the home, where we live and enjoy ourselves? • To remind us of life everlasting and to bless our future.

Slide 5: Life’s Continuity • By honoring nature through the evergreen tree, we affirm the continuity of life and light throughout the darkest days on earth.

Slide 6: Decorations • When we decorate the tree, it is a ceremony of offerings, which involves placing upon the tree of life precious and beautiful objects – spheres, miniatures, sparkling things, shining things, pretty things, funny things, things that only the family understands.

Slide 7: Offerings • By offering decorations to the spirit of life through the tree, we call to the life force and entrust our family’s future welfare to it. • By year after year placing objects which have meaning only within the family, a resonance is built up which protects the family.

Slide 8: Meaning and Memory • Each time the decorations are taken from their box in the yearly ritual, they have accumulated more meaning and memory. • These fragile, often reflective, and precious personal objects of beauty adorn the tree of life which becomes an embodiment of the family spirit.

Slide 9: Symbolism of the Lights • The lights on the tree symbolize the energy and life force of the magnetism and colors of breath, as growth and life radiate out from the branches, especially the tips of the branches. • The lights symbolize the divine presence which illuminates all.

Slide 10: An Altar of Light • The illuminated tree becomes an altar of light in the home. At this altar is an offering to the naturally existing divinity in all beings.

Slide 11: Light in Darkness • The lights are also a human comfort in the darkest days. A tree covered in lights indoors would mean little in the peak of July. This contrast gives the tree much of its beauty and meaning.

Slide 12: Light and Dark • As the lights contrast the dark days of winter, our hearts are reminded of the life force always present and the divine in all life.

Slide 13: Ancient Resonance • Ultimately it is an ancient thing we do when we bring a tree into the home. • It is an ancient nature worship, allowing an embodiment for a most ancient protective being, a form of God as a generative everlasting being of light living through the harmony of humanity’s reverence for nature.

Slide 14: Being of Light • Yet this being is nothing but a reflection of ourselves, a light- filled jewel-gifted transfigured reflection of the human form standing before us. • The decorated tree reflects the lord or lady of light within each of us.

Slide 15: Sparkling Beauty • We offer gifts beneath this being and adore its beauty. • We delight in its presence, gathering round its radiant glow.

Slide 16: O Tree! O tree of life that grows in each of us, O being of light and gifts and precious delights: “How lovely are your branches.”

Medicine Wheel

..when you’re in the center of the circle, which is the place of creator in that system, you are the human being that’s at the cross-point between the life and death earth-walk and spiritual beings that can come through our experience of this earth walk; there is a point of integration of those two, and we can embody that.

Judy Evaski continues her conversation with Carol Sill on the Medicine Wheel Path

C: Hi, we’re continuing our conversation, this is Judy Evaski and I’m Carol Sill, and we’re here in Vancouver talking about Judy’s spiritual path and her relationship with nature. I think that’s our next topic, right?

J: Yes. I would add that when I was working with, and I’m still working with, the Native elder, one of the first teaching tools that was used with me, aside from offering tobacco, was the medicine wheel. I was able to construct a medicine wheel, with his guidance, and began to learn some of the basic teachings in that path through that vehicle.

It was a wonderful tool for me to integrate all the paths that I had been exposed to. I’d always had a strong link to nature, to the other creatures in nature, not just us two-leggeds, as we are called, but also with the winged ones in particular. Also with the stones and the rocks, which are called ancestors. What my goal was, I’ve come to realize, in pursuing that path, was to try and learn the manner of speaking to all my relations, which the Native path teaches.

There have been millennia of time that humans have understood their place in creation, their relationship to all the other beings that we share this time and space with. And so my deepening has been in learning the language that promotes communication between all my relations and two-leggeds.

And one of the most wonderful things in the medicine wheel that I began to learn, this is just a simple thing that I think it’s okay to share in this format, is that you have the crossed axis. You have the north-south axis and you have the east-west axis. And in that tradition, and probably in many others, such as the Christian with the cross symbol, the east-west path is often considered the spiritual path. And the north-south is actually the earth walk.  So I’m just realizing as I speak that it’s maybe reversed in the Christian path, where I’ve heard the cross described as the horizontal is our outreaching to other beings, other humans, and the north-south or the up-down axis is our connection to spirit.

Anyway, the point is: when you’re in the center of the circle, which is the place of creator in that system, you are the human being that’s at the cross-point between the life and death earth-walk and spiritual beings that can come through our experience of this earth walk; that there is a point of integration of those two, and that we can embody that.

And I think that’s the purpose of the practice, and of all practices, is that we train ourselves to be more and more ready and more able to allow those energies that we can call divine sometimes, or we call inspiration, to flow through us and to stimulate us in some way to express what those divine energies are.

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Ancestors and the Weather

Forest Shomer talks about ancestors, the weather and farming. Part 3 of his discussion with Carol Sill.

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Agriculture and the Ancient Ways

Forest Shomer continues his conversation with Carol Sill on the ancient ways of farming and their application today. (Part 2 of 3)

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Forest Shomer: Zoroaster, the First Farmer

Seedmaster Forest Shomer discusses Ziraat and the origins of agriculture with Carol Sill (Part 1 of 3.)

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Source

Jim Van Wyck and Carol Sill talk about the meanings of the word “Source”.

“It’s a huge thing to talk about because the source isn’t separate from us and we’re not separate from the source, but we feel we have to go back to it. So all of the quest stories and the tales of going to the source, or going to the source of the Ganges, finding the mountain of Siva where the source of the water flows from; all of this is a metaphor for us to go inside ourselves and make those connections.”

Link here for the text version of this conversation.

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